The final week of the Ghost Shrimp Online Workshop was to create some visual development and backgrounds for a fictional cartoon. I’ve been working in Animation for a few years and managed some teams of Background Artists so it was thrilling to be in the position of the environment creator. The only rules were that we had to create 2 interiors and 1 exterior to show off a location and it had to be some kind of children’s play area.

This was the week where a lot of the lessons clicked into place for me. Previously I had been struggling to get a lot of the design illustrations completed on time.  I would always want to play with composition, perspective and shadows. But completing 3 full backgrounds in the same amount of time meant I had to throw all that to the side and let composition and spontaneity be part of the process. To my surprise, I had a lot more fun in the creation process and that enthusiasm bled into the work. I particularly enjoyed planning the layouts and adding a lot of line and texture to everything.

Creep Creep is not a real cartoon but to create the backgrounds I did have to do a lot of world-building behind the scenes. I think these backgrounds do contain a very cool premise but I’ll leave it to you to determine what the story is.